> This design is much simpler and yields various power and performance improvements though it's not based on Wayland nor Mir though Chrome plans to support these display server models."
--Try one of these:
This design is much simpler and yields various power and performance improvements. It's not based on Wayland or Mir though Chrome plans to support these display server models."
or:
This design is much simpler and yields various power and performance improvements; it's not based on Wayland or Mir, though Chrome plans to support these display server models."
It means it makes Chrome more secure.
This sort of thing is why Debian is so often seen as a realm of knee jerk lunatics. Debian isn't keeping up with features Chrome needs to be more resistant to browser exploits (which are used to install ACTUAL spyware) and the answer is "Chrome gathers statistics on how it's used so it's evil and we don't care if it breaks". WTF?
I understand the idea, yes. But:
1. Most of the time, it doesn't work. Let's face it, at least 95% of the people looking to buy a laptop don't understand this issue. A good amount of people doesn't care about spying either, because they think they have anything to hide, or because the US government is doing it so it must be good, or because the US government doing it makes it impossible to avoid anyway, or for a myriad other reasons. I think Lenovo would have to be in a very weak state for this to do them under.
2. If it worked, it wouldn't be a good thing anyway. The laptop business is a very expensive to enter and competitive one. If people ran a company out of business every time it displeased them enough, despite trying to rectify their mistake, nobody would want to enter the market. Who would want to risk their money in such a way? So the market would eventually stabilize with 2 or 3 remaining companies which are too big to bankrupt, or who people won't boycott because there's too much inertia and not enough alternatives.
If the market settled for instance on Dell and Apple, boycotting one would require rebuilding your entire infrastructure and way of doing things. This won't happen, so if such a situation is reached they can basically do whatever they want.
If we want a consumer friendly environment we need plenty of competition, and this means that bankrupting a company should be the absolute last resort.
That's a counterproductive way of doing things.
Whenever making that kind of statement towards any sort of business you're telling them that there's no point to try to correct whatever upset you, as all resources spent to that end are going to be in vain anyway.
The spyware gives them some money. If all people who hate it put Lenovo in their blacklist forever, then the most sensible business decision is keeping the spyware. The customers that hate it won't come back, and the ones that remain don't care, so nothing is gained by removing it after losing that part of the customer base.
Right, so here is seems how things are:
1. Google seems to have little regard for long term backwards compatibility, at least on the timeframes Debian wants it. Kernel 3.17 came out in October 2014. Fedora has a new enough kernel, but also doesn't have Chromium officially apparently because Google likes to clone various libraries and do API changes, rather than trying to work with the original developers, distributions, etc. So it seems Google mostly does its own thing and lets other people to deal with it.
2. So Google is now releasing browsers that require kernel 3.17 to work properly. Users want to run it on their systems.
3. But Jessie is frozen and so changes only happen for good reasons. The question is then whether to backport the TSYNC feature. On one hand, it's a new feature and it doesn't go in frozen releases, on the other hand it stops new versions of Chrome from running, which is a security concern. Ubuntu seems to have went with the later logic.
4. Ben's reaction is "1. I don't like Chrome, so no", and "2. Distro is in freeze, there needs to be a formal proposal explaining exactly what patch to merge, and a sympathetic maintainer, which I am not".
So really what's going on is a conflict between organizations. Google wants to move faster than Debian does, and Debian (or at least Ben) doesn't want to give Google special concessions.
Digging around a bit this is what I gathered:
TSYNC is some flag added to seccomp to aid in something relating to thread synchronization: http://patchwork.linux-mips.or...
And seccomp is a security mechanism of the Linux kernel used to implement the sandbox in Google Chrome, which it uses for instance to run the Flash plugin in such a way that it doesn't compromise the system if one of its many security weaknesses: http://lwn.net/Articles/347547...
None of this seems to have any relation to spyware, in fact it would seem to have the exact contrary purpose: protecting the system from potentially malicious code and security exploits.
Unless I'm missing something obvious, it sounds like Ben Hutchins (the Debian mailing list guy who made the comment on spyware) just dislikes Chrome for whatever reason unrelated to TSYNC and decided that it would be a fine way to ensure new versions of Chrome don't run.
Content blocking is included as native. AdBlock can be added as an extension:
... and one has already been done:
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
